A new survey just published reveals that companies are increasing their efforts to hire for Atlanta jobs.

The city’s small businesses helped lead hiring and salary trends in the South in September and bucked the nation, according to SurePayroll’s latest Small Business Scorecard.

Small businesses surveyed in Atlanta reported a 3 percent increase in hiring and a 1.6 percent rise in paycheck size, according to SurePayroll, a Glenview, Ill.-based provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) payroll processing for small businesses. In the South, the only region with hiring growth, the number of employees went up 0.4 percent and payrolls notched up 0.5 percent, while nationally, hiring was down 2.7 percent and salaries dipped 0.4 percent.

Overall optimism by small businesses was only 33 percent.

“The continued economic uncertainty has small businesses sitting on the edge of their seats hoping for a Hollywood ending that doesn’t appear likely anytime soon,” said Michael Alter, SurePayroll president and CEO, in a statement, as reported by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. “The good news is that small businesses are continuing to work smarter in the face of uncertainty, relying on technology to improve efficiency while still getting the most out of employees.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2011 at 11:24 pm and is filed under jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.